1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to a method and apparatus for driving a printer driver according to a determined type of application, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for driving the printer driver according to the determined type of application and a method and apparatus for installing a printer driver, in which the printer driver may be automatically selected and driven in accordance with the determined type of application.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the release of Windows Vista, users can print data by using two primary methods. One method uses an extensible markup language (XML) paper specification (XPS) driver. Another method uses a printer control language (PCL) driver, a postscript (PS) driver, or a graphical device interface (GDI) driver, referred to as legacy drivers. Conventionally, users have printed data by using the legacy driver. However, the XPS driver released with Windows Vista filters XPS data generated by a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application or a GDI-to-XPS converter and converts the filtered XPS data into a data format used by a user so as to perform a printing operation.
However, applications may be of two types, such as, a WPF type or a Win32 type. Due to the two types of applications, the performance of each application may be optimized by using an appropriate printer driver. The performances of a WPF application and a Win32 application may be optimized by respectively using the XPS driver and the legacy driver.
If an inappropriate printer driver is used, data to be printed has to be converted by using a GDI-to-XPS converter or an XPS-to-GDI converter, before the data is printed. If a converter is used, the printing speed or printing quality is reduced. If a converter is not used, the Win32 application may not print data using the XPS driver and the WPF application may not print data using the legacy driver. Accordingly, a user has to be aware of the type of application being used and select an appropriate printer driver whenever performing a printing operation.